Saturday, 30 September 2017

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Elon Musk! Rockets! Jetlag!

'I lost my hear to a Starship Trooper...'

So Elon Musk has decided that the longest part of a flight should be clearing customs. We're going to ignore the fact that often the longest part of any flight is clearing customs and security and switch around to what his project actually is.And what is that?Well the USGov/DARPA has long held ambitions to be able to deploy their forces anywhere in the world within an hour or two. Commonly know as the 'X-Plane', this would allow the direct insertion of forces wherever the President wanted and allow him to do so between sitting down for dinner and retiring to bed. A practical example of this would have been insertion of Special Forces into Afghanistan by dinnertime of September 11th. It's a fast response technology that would leave anything else they had kicking around looking old, if not completely obsolete.What Musk is proposing to do is to commercialise this technology, drive down it's cost and provide the USMil with an off the shelf method of deployment that could, if desired, be run as a self funding project when not needed - similar to the US Civil Reserve Air Fleet. And, because of economies of scale rendering the competition obsolete, this is likely to become the de facto deployment method - for any nation that could afford it.All very Starship Troopers. Now we just need the power armour.